


A breach, but an expansion

by middlemarch



Category: Wonder Woman (2017)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Greek Mythology - Freeform, Grief/Mourning, Time - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-18
Updated: 2017-06-18
Packaged: 2018-11-15 15:05:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 704
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11233491
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/middlemarch/pseuds/middlemarch
Summary: What deserves acknowledgement.





	A breach, but an expansion

The watch that had belonged to Steve’s father measured time one way. She felt the mechanism beat in her palm, she sensed the way the teeth bit each other and the seconds to make hands move. It was the way of man, of cleverness and consumption, and it was not her way.

She lay on the ground with a second shield above her, the one Ares thought to make chains or a coffin, and she watched the plane in the sky. He was pushing it to climb as far away from the earth as he could go, as if he would detonate heaven. His hand would be tight on the instrument, tighter than he had held her when they danced, when he had trembled against her. Her time unspooled, Clotho’s time that neither the gods nor men understood, but an Amazon could; an Amazon could understand how events moved into each other the way the tapestry came from the loom, the arrow from the bow. Hestia’s lasso—the Amazons knew if was not a weapon but a thread, mending when it could, a noose when it must. Steve had taken it around his wrist, again and again, having learned it was a tool and a gift, honest as Diana had not been.

He admitted he was a spy. She had not—though what else had her early lessons been, her child’s subterfuge, how she had hidden behind stones and in the branches of trees, how she had been caught parrying a feint by her Queen. She had hidden so much of herself, though she now knew the other Amazons had been aware of her origins, her aunt’s repeated exhortations to be more, do more, and the glances she had gotten in the agora, the amphitheater. 

He had not lied to himself. She had—convinced the treatises had been the sum total of knowledge when she had suspected there was more, ignored the power she felt when she crossed her wrists that pushed the air into the sea, the sea into the sky, she had accepted the story that she was a miracle when she was only another god, charged with a duty, eager to be finished and return to the grove, the valley, the plain room with the iron bedframe, the sleeping man unable to ask any more questions, give any more answers.

He had been willing, was willing, to make a sacrifice; he did not need to be assured of success. She was not—she missed Themyscira and she remembered how her mother had said “may not” and “shall never,” had plotted the course a sailboat would need to return. She had stood, dumb and stolid on the roof after killing the man who was not Ares, waiting and waiting for the War to end, she had left her sword where anyone could find it. She had not let herself hear the words Steve said before he left, not when he said them, when she could have argued or let her comprehension show in her eyes, her hand raised to his face in a blessing, a binding. He had been hopeless but not despairing and she had not let herself be either. She lay on the earth and watched him flying away from everything and from her and she would have done anything to get him back. He had kissed her, very softly, and walked away.

Men wanted to live forever and Steve had taken his death early, alone. He would close his eyes and remember something, the future they would not have, the lasso’s grasp on his wrist, Chief’s voice humming into the firelight. She would live forever and wish for an ending to loneliness, for the look in his eyes when he taught her about the world, to be a woman who might grieve, an Amazon who would sorrow. A god could do neither. The watch ticked in her hand and she heard her name the way he had said it at dawn, _diana_ , when it had meant he had come home. She knew she had found the last place that would be home, the metal around her a roof, walls, window and doors, her eyes filled with his disappearing star.

**Author's Note:**

> Some more Diana/Steve angsty musing. Title from John Donne (again).


End file.
